Horse Soldiers is the dramatic account of a small band of Special Forces soldiers who secretly entered Afghanistan following 9/11 and rode to war on horses against the Taliban. Outnumbered forty to one, they pursued the enemy across mountainous terrain and, after a series of intense battles, captured the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, which was strategically essential if they were to defeat the Taliban.

Like most everybody on the team, Bennett spoke Arabic and had been trained in the art of sniper fire, mortar launch, and high altitude parachute jumps from 25,000 feet, during which he would breathe from a mini tank of oxygen strapped to his arm. He and Diller were keeping an eye on an eager group of younger gunfighters, average age thirty-two, each with about eight years in SF. "This is your first rodeo," Diller had told junior weapons specialist Sean Coffers, who had joined the unit from the 101st Airborne. "You're sticking with me." Nearly everybody was married and had children; there were more than a few broken marriages in the rearview mirror. Sitting next to Bennett was Vern Michaels, the good-humored senior communications officer, and junior engineer Patrick Remington. These six guys were the A-Team, the Alpha cell, of the twelve-man detachment.

The ride was exhilarating, at first. It seemed to Spencer that every few steps his horse would turn and look at him and say, "You're sure a big bastard. Why don't you get off and walk?"

Spencer believed the horse was actually huffing and puffing, as if to be melodramatic. The stirrups were short and Spencer's knees were practically in his chest. The horse ambled along the rocky path. Spencer's back started to ache. He was wearing his load-bearing vest crammed with ammo, grenades, water. It weighed about forty pounds. His M-4, which weighed another seven pounds, was slung across his chest.

Soon after moving into the fort, nearly everyone on the teams grew deathly ill. When fresh water had failed to arrive on a resupply drop, they'd taken their chances drinking from the local tap, and now everyone regretted the decision. Ben Milo was struck with a case of diarrhea that he felt would kill him (it would last nine days). He and the rest of his team were camped in the three miserable rooms in the northern end of the fort, on the second floor. At one point, Milo grew so sick that he had to sleep in the bathroom, hurriedly scuttling between his sleeping bag and the dark hole in the floor a few feet away.

The very air in the fort seemed diseased. The men explored its maze of dank rooms and dark passageways, the halogen beams of their flashlights passing over rough mud walls that sprouted tufts of animal hair and straw - crude building materials - and revealed odd sights. Some rooms were filled floor to ceiling with small sticks; others were piled high with shoes; some seemed to have been the scene of horrific struggles, the floors tracked with heavy boots and dried pools of blood. After a half hour of wandering, the men would step out of a doorway and into another part of the fort without any idea of how they'd arrived there. The Magic Castle, some of them called it.